Geraldo lived all his life in Belo Horizonte and all of his adult life in the Jardim America Biarro, specifically in a tired little set of rooms tucked off a narrow steep alley, Beco Edna, in Favela da Ventosa in the hilly southern part of the city.

Geraldo was a stone mason by trade and when he could get work, he earned enough to provide food and clothing for his wife Jendira and their three young boys, Leandro, Leonardo and Luiz. But there wasn’t always work to be gotten and like many men in the favela, Geraldo sometimes allowed himself too get a little to close to the “marginals,” the petty thieves and the foot soldiers in the drug wars that erupt in all the favelas from time to time.

By most accounts, Geraldo was just a bystander, mostly innocent, when stray bullets injured both his legs in an shooting in Favela da Ventosa in 1990. Geraldo recovered enough to walk some with the help of two cane. His legs always bothered him and he was never able to work again. It was hard enough just to get out of the little house in the alley. There’s not much of a social safety net for the very poor in Brazil, no disability payments, no income supplements. Suddenly the family that could barely get by on what Geraldo made as a stone mason had nothing.

Jendira had just given birth to Luiz, and Leandro and Leonardo were still in elementary school. With three sons and a disabled husband, Jendira knew the family’s survival depended on her, and so she set up a salon in the tiny kitchen of the house on Beco Edna. She didn’t charge much, and the women whose hair she cut and styled liked her work. With no other hope for help, Jendira worked as many hours as possible in her kitchen-salon. Geraldo loved his sons. He helped around the house as best he could, but there was little he could do and he often turned deeply and sadly inward.

As the years passed, though, Jendira began to look outside herself and the four walls of her favela house. She began to look for hope for her life and her boys’ lives. In 1998 or 1999 she began to attend the new Presbyterian church just down the hill from the favela, Igreja Presbiteriana no Jardim América. There she heard a message of good news and hope. She found dynamic worship and an amazing pastor who told the stories of God the Father’s amazing and forgiving love in the life, death and resurrection of the Son, Jesus Christ. She met people who said the world could be different and then, by the power of the Holy Spirit, set about making it different by feeding the hungry and providing education for those who had none.

Jendira was baptized and joined the church. She helped around the church whenever and however she could and people began to notice something about the joy beneath her broad smile.

By now the boys were growing older. Leandro, was around 20 and had learned his mother’s art and had opened his own small barber shop in a storefront not far from Beco Edna and just across the street from the building where the Presbyterian church served soup on Saturday nights. Leonardo was six years younger, less ambitious and spent too much time in the streets with the same kind of “marginals” his father had once known. Luiz was still young, but little boys grow up quickly in the favela.

Jendira talked to her boys about going to church with her. Leandro began to attend with his mother and was baptized, but wasn’t sure what to do with his new faith. Leonardo and Luiz wanted nothing to do with it.

Then God began an amazing work. Some North Americans from Beaver, Pennsylvania, came to visit the Presbyterian church down the hill. They came to help serve soup at the building near Beco Edna and across from Leandro’s barber shop. Leonardo and his cousin Edvan were fascinated by the strangers who tried to speak to them in broken Portuguese. The story has been told elsewhere, but the Americans kept returning and Leonardo and Edvan kept getting a little closer to them and their Brazilian friends from the Presbyterian church until finally they were just close enough and Good Shepherd pulled them to safety before they fell into the life of the marginals.

In March, 2004, Leonardo, Edvan and five of their friends were baptized into Christ at the Presbyterian church down the hill from the favela. Some of the Americans from Beaver, Pennsylvania, were there that day.

Leandro had watched his younger brother change and began to put his own faith more at the center of his life, but still wondered what changes God might have in store for him.

Folks from Beaver returned to Jardim América in July of 2004 and again God used them in amazing ways. Unlike the previous few summers when the Americans were there and he stayed at the edges of things, Leandro decided to get to know Leonardo’s new American friends a little better. As the Americans got to know him, they found in Leandro a bright and caring young man and they could see that God had given him a rich array of gifts that needed to be challenged and developed. They talked about going college and urged Leandro to work on the entrance exam. They told that they could help him realize some of the dreams that God was beginning to stir up in his heart.

Amazingly, Leandro took and passed the college entrance exam on his first try in the fall of 2004. In February 2005 he entered college in a course in business administration. Friends from Park Presbyterian Church in Beaver Pennsylvania helped pay the tuition and provide books. He moved his barber shop from the store front near Beco Edna to the main street of the favela. He began to make a little more money and was able to pay for part of his college education and began to help his mother provide for the family. He was elected a deacon at Igreja Presbiteriana.

Leonardo also continued to deepen his faith and to grow stronger against the temptations of the marginals. He and Edvan and some of their friends formed a banda, a band, that helps lead worship at IPJA and they dream of a full time music ministry.

Luiz remained at a safe distance from all of this, but found himself in church more often than he ever thought he’d be – playing ping pong, listening to the banda and sometimes even listening to sermons.

Jendira’s smile grew more deeply joyful as she watched God’s gracious provision for her sons’ lives.

But in May, 2006, Geraldo’s legs which had never fully healed after the shooting in the favela became infected. Medical care is not good for people who live their lives in places like Beco Edna. By the time anyone thought to get Geraldo to the hospital, the infection had spread throughout his body. On May 24, sixteen years after the shooting in the favela, Geraldo died of his wounds.

God has been faithful to Jendira. Her boys have grown up and two of the three have come to a bright and joyful faith in Christ. And God is after Luiz! As the boys were growing up they had a father who cared deeply for them, and each of them knows it. The house on Beco Edna is still desperately small and dank and dark, but it is full of love.

Pray for Jendira, Leandro, Leonardo and Luiz. Give thanks for all that God had done for them and for his comfort in their loss.

Right now Jendira and her sons have a need that some of us might help meet. Funerals are simple things in Brazil, but still there are expenses. There is a government health care system, but still there are expenses. Leandro has done much to help and Jendira continues to work in her kitchen salon, but there were $750 in unpaid bill left after Geraldo was buried. The Session at IPJA has given $250 – it’s all they had. Maybe some of the Presbyterians from Pennsylvania (or elsewhere) could help with the $500 that’s left.

Make a check payable to Park Presbyterian Church
275 Commerce St.
Beaver, PA 15009
Note “Belo-Beaver (funeral)” on the memo line.